Journées sonores, canal de Lachine is a sound project which reflects on shifts in the soundscape of the Lachine canal as it changed with each phase of a revitalization project, as the canal re-opened as a recreation area in 2002, after many decades of dormancy while the St. Lawrence Seaway moved shipping and industrialization to another area on the south shore of the river. Like all urban renewal projects, this multi-year, multi-million dollar project has profound effects on the areas surrounding the canal. By recording sounds from the areas around the canal over several years, this project created condensed sonic images that followed these urban changes, as well as imaginary scenes from its past based on interviews with local residents. These sound recordings do not frame particular buildings or scenes, but point to relationships among different sources such as auto and boating traffic, cyclists, industrial/construction machines and pedestrians, and reveal the changing ambiences of these places over time.

In the final phase of this project, a multimedia installation was produced for display at the Musée de Lachine (2004), in a historical building adjacent to the canal. The show included an interactive computer installation, bringing together sounds recorded throughout several years. It also included more composed meditations on particular sites, along with photographic and drawn images and found objects. Comments from the project’s website were also included. Visitors to the gallery were encouraged in turn to comment on the installation and how it affected their perception of and attitude toward the sounds of the Canal. It was possible then to go outside and do a soundwalk immediately after experiencing the installation.

From July 16-19, 2014, I was fortunate to take part in an interdisciplinary workshop held in Maine, US, directed by Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University, lead investigator of the Global Sustainable Soundscapes Network (Co-PI is Catherine Guastavino – McGill University, Canada). This research project is funded by the US National Science Foundation.

The Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve is part of a larger network of such research centres. It is open to the public, with many educational walking trails. Within the reserve are grasslands, woodlands, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes and a long undeveloped sandy beach.

The soundwalk took place on the morning of July 17. We met initially at a gazebo near the reserve educational centre. Here, I introduced my soundwalk research and suggested some tips for listening while on the walk. We handed out small notebooks that Prof. Pijanowski had prepared, which included a list of sites where soundscape recordings had been made, keyed to the Wells Reserve map (sites such as a vernal pond, coastal tree, Laudholm beach, and others). Short observations made by the recording crew were also included (“Coastal tree: most diverse site with birds and insects”). Suggestions for soundscape notes were provided for listeners (“Sense of place: sounds that define this place / remind or connect to you, family, community / symbolic sounds”). After the introduction, people split up into smaller groups of one to four people, and began their walks through the site. Later in the day, some people met with me at a session, while others contributed their observations in individual conversations.

My soundwalk took me through a grassland area, rich in insect sounds in the middle of the day, through a cool woodland with distant surf towards the north. As the surf became louder, I passed a pond that attracted shorebirds, and arrived at a construction site, with the sounds of saws and moving of construction materials. Large many-bedroomed houses were being built right up to the boundary of the Wells reserve, and along Laudholm beach beyond drifted the sounds of families playing in the surf.

At this point, I reflected on the educational signs that I had seen along the way, that pointed out important notes about vegetation and wildlife habitat. I thought that perhaps information could also be included on the effects of tourist and recreational development on the estuarine area.

In the session later that day, the importance of recognizing disciplinary listening was mentioned. A bird biologist said that, since we had discussed this in the introductory session, she was more alert to disciplinary tendencies, that normally she would want to focus on types of birds and their interactions. Being aware of this tendency allowed her to consciously open up to other kinds of listening. Both the soundwalk notebook and the opportunity for followup discussion provided clearings where these other kinds of listening could be explored in productive conversation.

In February 2014, I contacted the participants of a Soundwalking Interactions (SI) performance-installation, presented at York University for the Dance Dramaturgy conference in June 2011, to enquire on their memories of the project. At SI, we were interested in learning if this project might have affected their subsequent work, and in how their memories of the experience took shape. How does the memory of such an embodied experience translate into words? How to account for the elusive remains of an encounter between artists of different disciplines and the experience of immersive environments? Collaborations often work mysteriously; others’ ideas infiltrate one’s own and, in the case of performance, blend into an ephemeral production that survives mostly in memory, with videos and photographs sometimes providing an imagery for the experience. Such encounters may influence and further inspire artists in their work, for their vision may have momentarily met another’s and created a communality of interests that persists in time and memory. Similarly, the memory of an immersion within the environment of a performance may exert an influence on further artistic work. The embodied mind remembers and may partially reproduce the experience throughout subsequent works.

The Dance Dramaturgy performance-installation was a choreography structured by a soundwalk and by dancers improvising in a responsive environment. The performers’ movements activated edited sound excerpts from the walk in different sections of the installation and traces of those spatial explorations also appeared as colored projections onto a screen. The result could be considered as a multilayered score of different traces of embodied memories: firstly those from the soundwalk in a park in Toronto, secondly those from the rehearsed improvisations and creative process and finally, the real-time responsive colored projections also offered ephemeral traces of the live performers’ improvised movements. With this project of returning to the memory of the performance, we are adding an additional layer, one that is perhaps even more difficult to seize: the lasting but ethereal traces of a performance in the participants’ memory.

The participants came from different disciplines: sound arts, digital media arts and dance. They seemed to share an interest for using landscapes and soundscapes as playgrounds for creation and artistic inspiration, both in their previous and subsequent works. I gathered the accounts of four participants, via email exchanges with two of the dancers, Jesse Dell and Tracey Norman, and a recorded conversation between artists/scholars Andra McCartney and Don Sinclair, who both initiated the project.

The two dancers described their experience as two different moments in time: firstly the experience of the soundwalk and then the collaborative work. In one account, the memory of the walk was very detailed and multi-sensorial: “ I remember my rubber boots and my red rain coat. I remember the sound of the planes in the sky, the trickling of the stream we briefly stopped at, the sound of our steps in the gravel, the sounds of our steps breaking small twigs and sticks on the ground.” (Jesse) The other account expresses how the memory of the walk permanently transformed the space for this other dancer’s continuing experience of the park: “I remember very clearly our walk through the ravine and I now live very close to where we started the walk – in the St-Clair West area- and so whenever I pass by I think of it. When I walk through the ravine I’m quite aware of the sounds and how they change from season to season because of the soundwalking project.” (Tracey) Both accounts detailed different appropriations of the same event, the former returning in memory to her personal embodied and sensorial perspective of the walk, the latter inscribing the memory of the walk and furthering its impact on everyday walking practices.

One dancer also mentioned how the walk as well as the collaboration between artists of different disciplines contributed to bringing “a larger basis of experience, understanding and relationship moving into creation.” She further adds: “it helped create a truly multimedia experience with many layers.” (Tracey) Don Sinclair also described this interdisciplinary collaboration as “communicating through different means and modes throughout the process” which gave the project different “layers of knowledge”. Both Andra McCartney and Don Sinclair insisted during their conversation on how the dancers brought a different embodied understanding to the soundwalk and the creative process, one that they were unfamiliar with: “it made me much more attentive about the walking part of soundwalking as well as the listening part, which I was much more focused on in the past, coming out of sound ecology.” (Andra) She described how this collaboration with dancers helped her in developing more awareness about the flocking movements of the groups she led during other soundwalks, and helped her to better transfer the lead of the walk to others by simply following these impulses coming from the group.

The way that the dancers physically engaged their bodies into exploring the walk together had already sketched a score for the performance. The rehearsals organized the memories of their movements as a flock and as individuals during the walk, generating a structure for the improvised performance. Throughout our exchange, Jesse remembered finding a heavy metal handle during the walk that made a sound that she particularly liked, and she repeatedly played with this sound during the performance. The dancers’ bodies communicated through movement the landscape and soundscape that they remembered from the walk. In a conversation published online on The Dance Current,[1] Bee Pallomina (another dancer from this SI project) speaks about her method of creation for a subsequent work as “moving not as ourselves but as a landscape”. Perhaps her experience of soundwalking as a creative process for the performance-installation has informed her understanding of “moving as a landscape”. Undoubtedly, her interests remain in close connection with the work produced with Soundwalking Interactions.

The dancers perpetuated in their dance the memory of the soundwalk’s landscape and soundscape and the space they created was further transformed with the projections remixing their live movements within the performance-installation. Could all performances be considered as the remixed memory of a creation process and rehearsals? Traces of previous works surviving in subsequent works also are, in a way, remixing this memory once more. Accounts of performances are deemed to be partial but if pieced together, they may bring a larger perspective on the lasting remains of performances and on the intricate influence of collaborations.

I was asked to write a text for the exhibition catalogue of Hlysnan, which opened recently in Luxembourg and is ongoing for the next few months. My essay is on everyday listening and is informed greatly by conversations with listeners during the Soundwalking Interactions project.

In the Old English word hlysnan, “to listen”, the focus is on the notions of attention and intent. Similarly the emphasis in the project HLYSNAN: The Notion and Politics of Listening lies on the active act not merely of hearing – usually referring to automatic or passive sound perception – but rather specifically on listening; hearing with intent.

Listening requires intensified concentration and attentiveness towards what one is listening to; it is linked to the notion of desire, anticipation and understanding, a striving for a possible meaning. HLYSNAN: The Notion and Politics of Listening understands listening as agency, as gesture, as attitude and as taking a position. The exhibition attempts to reconcile audio practices with contemporary social and political realities and invites the visitor to actively experience, listen and engage with the sense of hearing to the various complex interplays.

Publication | The accompanying HLYSNAN: The Notion and Politics of Listening publication is considered an extending and supplementing format to the exhibition. Not only the concepts materialised in the exhibition are developed and contextualised further, but with complementing contributions by additional artists, the project offers a comprehensive overview on the various questions around the notion and politics of listening.

On the evening of March 21, the Soundwalking Interactions group got together for one final soundwalk—Balade Montreal Equinox Soundwalk—following four years of consistent soundwalks and post-walk discussions. The walk began at St. Laurent metro station (corner of St. Laurent and Boul. de Maisonneuve) and headed south towards the Palais de Congres and China Town. The route was not planned in advance and took roughly forty-five minutes to complete. I led the soundwalk, accompanied by three participants, through a series of interior spaces, busy sidewalks and alleyways.

The excursion was one of the most dynamic soundwalks that I have ever participated in. In part, this can be attributed to the location of the walk which transitioned through many borders within the city: namely, the Old Port, downtown and China Town. Liminal (or transitional) zones typically have vibrant sensory ecologies, often resulting in chaotic and competing sensory encounters. Andra McCartney has previously written on this site about the concept of econtonality vis-à-vis sounding environments and listening. This concept is particularly useful when mobilized in relation to urban sounds. As she writes:

The ecotone is a marginal zone, a transitional area where species from adjacent ecosystems interact. Some species in an ecotone are from neither ecosystem but thrive here and do not live elsewhere, because of the rich possibilities contained in such regions, which have characteristics of more than one ecosytem. Beaches and the edges between forests and grassland are both examples of ecotones, or the stratified fresh and salt waters of the confluence where river meets sea.

It is also worth noting that the dynamic intensity of the soundwalk came not only from a range of intermittent loud and softer bursts of sound, but also from temperature changes, gusts of wind, and a mixing of pungent smells dispersed throughout the walk. One of the larger objectives of this project is to better understand how sensory experiences such as touch and smell connect to hearing and various ways of listening during soundwalks. This particular part of Montreal, at this point in the year, seems to provide an ideal site for considering questions at the intersection of listening, walking and sensory experience. Additionally, this is a layered area of the city, with the Autoroute Ville-Marie running just below the sidewalks and with many entryways to Montreal’s Underground City—the more than 30 km network of tunnels, corridors and commercial spaces located below the downtown core of the city. This layering heightened the complexity of the walk given that while traversing along the sidewalks there were sounds coming from above and below.

The post-walk discussion took place in a restaurant in China Town. We opened with a conversation detailing some of the ways in which moving in a group of four while using recording equipment affects other pedestrian encounters. One listener noticed that we seemed to draw attention to ourselves as we moved through the Palais de Congres. Another participant remembered the way we altered people’s conversations as we passed by.

Michael Langiewicz, one of the recordists, recounted his experience of recording a group of skateboarders–which are heavily featured in the audio-visual piece below–and some of the phase issues he encountered while recording them.

Andra talked about how wind is often the most difficult element to deal with when making soundwalking recordings (and/or recording outside).

Another listener mentioned that he was surprised to find quietness in many of the alleyways near the Autoroute.

One of the participants discussed walking by the aftermath of an accident and how he was unable to record anything of note as the area was eerily quiet. Andra mentioned how we walked through an accident scene in Mile End on a previous soundwalk and felt that the experience was characterized by a “weird silence.”

Ben discussed how cinematic the walking experience felt, especially when magnified by recording.

The audio-visual soundscape piece below derives from three distinct soundwalk recordings by Ben Cardilli, Michael Langiewicz and Andrew Willson. Each recordist took a different forty-five minute route after they moved away from the St. Laurent metro station. I cut the recordings into 20 to 60 second fragments and then edited them together using quick cross-fades. Ben’s recording is panned all the way to the left; Andrew’s is to the right; and Michael’s is directly in the middle with the volume level slightly lowered. All three of the recordings play out at the same time throughout the piece.

When I met Suzy Sulaiman last November, she was telling me about a remarkable sound and radio art event that she had attended in Manila. Her stories were so compelling and interesting that I suggested she put these words down for others to hear. This is her first blog entry about that event.